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Comment by cletus | Hacker News Reader

What I find interesting are the anecdotes (of which I've now seen several) of first-time tablet owners buying TouchPads because they're so cheap.

One has to wonder if HP hasn't inadvertently created a whole new group of future iPad owners.

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Can you share some of these? Should be interesting reading.

I'm mostly seeing nerds going crazy at the cheap hackable tablet.

Check out the various threads on slickdeals.net. There are literally over a thousand pages (split among multiple threads) of people scrambling to buy these at the discounted prices. Very few of the people there are geeks, mostly just normal folks trying to jump in on what is seen as a huge value (~75% price drop over a single day).

Seeing those forums will also show you why you will never be able to buy one of these online at the new price unless you are extremely lucky. The item is selling out in seconds every time the price drop is noticed at a new retailer, and these people are tracking all of them.

I tried to jump in on this last night and put an order in for the 16gb at Microcenter's online site less than a minute after the new pricing went live there. The order made it through their website and I even got a confirmation email and a precharge ding on my credit card, went to bed thinking I'd be playing with WebOS on a tablet sometime next week but woke up to an email saying my order was cancelled due to insufficent stock.

I purchased one at 12:40 PM PST today from Amazon, at full retail price. Four hours later, they promised me to issue a refund so the price was the $99 HP price.

It wasn't incredibly difficult to get one, if you really wanted to.

I just bought 2 this morning from HP Small Business store. Pessimism sucks.

as a first gen ipad owner, I think it will have the opposite effect. I had the ipad sitting on my dining table for over a year now, collecting dust as I'd rather use my kindle for reading, my laptop for computer stuff or phone when on the go. I know a lot of people will disagree, but I know for a lot of people once the whole new toy effect wears off.. it becomes an expensive toy. For the people like me it will be hard to justify paying $500 for a tablet again.

I think its actually quite brilliant strategy as HP is still in the business of selling computers, flood the market with good, cheap tablets and reduce the magical experience to a commodity and hope it works. Asus had the same sort of lead with netbooks, and once the market got flooded they became commodity.

Well, not really. I have a bunch of reasons to not to buy iPad or Android tablet, but I had only one reason to buy this one: at $99 I don't really care if I have any use for this tablet or not.

I guess this is also quite a good marketing plan. Now with over 250,000 tablets in the market, it ruins the ipad market + creates a nice pool of app developers.

Not really.

The ipad sold (as near as I can find) nearly 14.8M first gen and another 10M+ second gen [1]. Thus the ipad market is roughly 100x bigger, which that multiple growing every day. I can't see why you'd possibly choose to develop an app for a market that starts off 100x as small, doesn't have neighboring markets like iphones/ipod touches which use the same api and tooling, and for which the main developer has just bailed.

[1] http://ipod.about.com/od/ipadmodelsandterms/f/ipad-sales-to-...

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